"On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company. The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself. It starts, as most stories do, with it's prequel." An insanely detailed - although missing certain parts, here and there - look at Final Fantasy VII's engine. As in, 211 pages detailed. You might want to grab a coffee.

Either way, the facts we know for certain are what Nintendo stated, i.e. they elected to go with the cartridge over the CD, even if that was a marketing cover up. I know wikipedia can be full of rubbish, but check the sources, the sources the wikipedia body refers to usually is a gold mine.

Wikipedia also talks about how Nintendo stitched Phillips up over the SNES CD[1] (which is why the CDi had licences for some Nintendo characters). So it's not inconceivable that Nintendo largely brought this on themselves by burning enough bridges that the other patent holders were reluctant to work with the Japanese games company.

I guess at least then, it would appear to some that Sony engineered the attack and to others, that Nintendo chose to avoid such technology altogether.